“A man that likes to stand out.”
“In his condition he can hardly hope not to. As undertaker, did you conduct a post-mortem examination upon Littlejohn?”
“I dug for the slug, but it passed on through.”
“Hardly exhaustive. Has he been interred?”
“Buried? Not yet; he’s in back. What are you, Pinkerton?”
“I am merely a visitor with a passion for justice. Would you object if Dr. Watson examined the corpse?”
Woods began to speak, but at that moment Wyatt Earp spread his coat casually, exposing the handle of his revolver. The small man closed his mouth and led us with a waddling gait round the edge of a canvas flap bisecting the tent.
I won’t belabour the reader with the clinical details of my examination. At Holmes’s direction I probed the ghastly wound, then covered the naked body with a sheet and wiped my hands.
“Downwards trajectory through the abdomen,” I said. “Thirty degrees.”
“Holliday was taller than Littlejohn,” Woods said. “It’s natural he would fire at a downward angle.”
Holmes didn’t appear to be listening. “Mr. Earp, would you say the ground sloped thirty degrees at the scene of the crime?”
“About that. I worked on a track gang once and learned a thing or two about grades.”
“Thank you. My compliments, Mr. Woods, upon your reconstructive skills. With rouge and wax you’ve managed to make Mr. Littlejohn appear in excellent health. Would you allow me to buy you a whisky at the Mescalero Saloon, to apolgise for having wrongly suspected you?”
“I won’t drink with Holliday’s friend. I don’t trust him.”
Holmes took Earp aside. The pair spoke in low tones. At length the frontiersman left, but not before casting a dark glance back at Woods over his shoulder.
“Mr. Earp understands and has recused himself from our celebration,” Holmes said.
One whisky became three, then four. I am not a man of temperance, but neither am I bibulous, and I measured carefully my ingestion whilst marvelling at the little man’s capacity and Holmes’s. Their speech grew loud, their consonants less crisp. I had not seen my companion in a state of inebriation and felt embarrassed for him and for my country. I became distinctly ill at ease as darkness fell and the saloon filled with teamsters and miners, all of whom seemed to share my tablemates’ fondness for spirits. I remembered what Holliday had said about a bright moon being ideal for a hanging. Although I had not yet come round to Holmes’s point of view regarding the prisoner’s innocence, I believed no man should be denied his day in court. The guard at the jail could not withstand a drunken mob, and Earp and I would not greatly alter the odds with my friend in an intoxicated state.
Holmes was insensitive to the danger. He suggested we escort Woods back to his establishment, but in truth, when he rose he was as unsteady on his feet as our guest. I kept my hand in my revolver pocket as we walked through that den of smoke and evil intentions, feeling very much upon my own.
My fears for my companion’s clouded faculties were realised when he steered Woods in a direction opposite the path to his tent.
“Holmes,” I said, “this isn’t—”
He cut me off with a sloppy hiss, a finger to his lips and his other hand clutching the little man’s collar, essentially holding him up; Woods was nearly comatose.
Holmes winked at me then. In that moment I knew that he was sober.
Confused and only partially encouraged—for three just men against an enraged herd is scarcely better than two—I accompanied the pair outside the mining camp and down the slope where the murder of Hank Littlejohn had occurred.
“Holmes!” I jerked out my revolver.
A group of men stood at the base of the descent. I recognised Elmer Dundy, Littlejohn’s truculent teamster partner, and the miners who had been with him when he’d accosted us in the saloon.
Holmes grasped my wrist. “Spare them, Doctor. They’re witnesses.”
“Let’s get this done with.” Dundy’s tone now was free of bluster. I considered him more dangerous in this humour than ever. “I came prepared.” He held up a length of rope ending in a noose.
“One moment. Mr. Earp?”
“Here.”
That fellow strode out of the shadow of a piñon tree into the light of a moon that was, in Holliday’s words, “as big as a pumpkin.” His revolver was in his hand.
Dundy and his friends fell into growling murmurs. Algernon Woods, who until this moment had been talking and singing to himself, grew silent, and to a great measure less incoherent. “What’s this about? Where’s my tent?”
“It’s Holliday! He’s busted out!” One of the miners pointed.
We turned to observe a tall, emaciated figure at the top of the slope, wearing a voluminous pale coat and a broad-brimmed hat that shadowed the top half of his face and the hollows in his cheeks. One bony wrist stuck far out of its sleeve as the figure raised his arm to shoulder level and pointed a long-barreled revolver directly at Holmes and Woods.
Several of Dundy’s friends clawed at their overalls, only to stop at a harsh command from Earp, accompanied by the crackling of the hammer as he levelled his weapon at the crowd.
Holmes, with a foolhardiness I could attribute only to the bottle, left Woods weaving to ascend the slope, straight towards the gunman. When he stood beside the figure at the top, he said, “Observe his stance. Is it habitual with Holliday?”
“Ask anyone,” Earp said. “Only fools in dime novels fire from the hip.”
“Mr. Dundy?”
The teamster conferred with his friends, nodded. He was hesitant, and with good reason: All could see that Holmes stood two heads higher than the man identified as Holliday.
Holmes produced a ball of string, one end of which he tied to the barrel of the gunman’s pistol, then relieved him of it and assumed the former’s stance. “Watson!”
I abandoned my weapon to its pocket, the better to catch the spool as he threw it in my direction.
“Mr. Earp, you are Littlejohn’s height, are you not?”
“Give or take an inch, I reckon. I only saw him horizontal.”
“Kindly take Mr. Woods’s place.”
But there was nothing kind in the way Earp shoved the little tailor aside and supplanted him. He stood, holding his aim upon the group of witnesses as, seeing Holmes’s purpose, I unwound the spool.
“Taut, dear fellow! A bullet observes no principle other than the shortest distance between two points.”
I pulled the string tight and placed the spool against Earp’s person. It touched him high on the chest.
“Littlejohn was struck low in the abdomen. You will observe, gentlemen, that I stand at about Holliday’s height.”
No objections were raised. Holmes then returned the pistol to the much shorter man at his side, who raised it to shoulder level and aimed it down the slope. When at this angle I tightened the string, it touched Earp at his abdomen.
“Perspective, gentlemen. A short man standing at an angle thirty degrees higher than the man he is facing must appear taller; but the laws of physics are inviolate.” So saying, he snatched the hat off the man dressed as Holliday.
“So sorry.” The Chinese opium seller smiled and bowed to his audience. “One pipee apiece, courtesy of Mr. Holmes.”
“The thing was simplicity itself,” said Holmes, once we were settled in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse, across from the room where Doc Holliday snored and coughed by turns, resting from his incarceration; or more precisely, from his celebration of same at the Mescalero Saloon. “Woods knew Holliday’s sartorial preferences and designed a similar wardrobe for himself whose cuffs fell short of his wrists and whose trousers swung free of his insteps; he was foolish enough to leave it among his scraps, where Earp found it whilst the rest of us sampled the fare at the Mescalero. Had he been unsuccessful, he was to interrupt our drinking session and whisper in my ear. The fact that he did not satisfied me that I had surmised correctly, and I proce
eded as we had discussed.
“The subliminal impression created by the costume is of a man too tall for his garb, hence tall. A loose coat implies emaciation regardless of the portliness contained, and an undertaker’s knowledge of cosmetics paints hollows in plump cheeks as easily as it fills in the ravages that scoop out flesh in the final stages of debilitating illness. Stir in a pale moon and the shadows cast by a hat with a broad brim, and you have the recipe for a clever sham.
“I am guilty, through Earp, of burgling Woods’s store. I also took the liberty of palming a spool of his string during our visit. Coughing and cursing, in Holliday’s distinctive Georgia drawl, could only have contributed to the illusion,” he continued. “As Woods said himself, Holliday is a man who likes to stand out. The rest was theatre.”
I said, “I’ll wager it cost you another sovereign to enlist the Chinese’s cooperation.”
“I rather think he enjoyed performing, and would have done it for half. But what price a man’s life, be it even so tenuous and sinister as Holliday’s?”
“And what of Woods? That tiny cell won’t hold off Dundy’s vengeance for long.”
“Wyatt Earp has pledged to protect him until the circuit judge arrives. I do believe his passion for justice is equal to mine; as his loyalty to his friend is to yours.”
This warmed me more than I could say. I felt that a barrier between us had fallen.
“And what is your gain,” I said, “beyond justice?”
He rubbed his hands.
“The chance to drub Wyatt Earp at the game of Faro. I take my profits as they come.”
THE
ADVENTURE OF
THE GREATEST
GIFT
“You know, Watson,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, “that I am not a religious man. Neither, however, am I a blasphemous one, and I trust I won’t offend one of your fine sentiments when I wish that the Great Miracle could be repeated in the case of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. I do miss him these foul evenings.”
The date of this pronouncement, according to the notes I have before me, was the twenty-third of December, 1901. The fog that night was particularly dense and yellow, and to peer out through the windows in Holmes’s little sitting-room in the quarters we used to share was an exercise in futility: as well gaze into a filthy mirror.
Beneath that Stygian mass of coal-exhaust and vapour, the fresh snowfall of the morning, which had carried such promise of an immaculate Yuletide, had turned as brown as the Thames and clung to hoof and boot alike in sodden clumps. It seemed as if the Great Grimpen Mire of evil memory had spread beyond Devonshire to fill the streets of London. The heavens themselves, it appeared, had joined us in mourning the loss of our good queen, dead these eleven months.
I was concerned by my friend’s remark; not because it stung my faith, but for the evidence it gave of the depth of his depression. Weeks had passed since he had last been engaged upon one of the thorny problems that challenged his intellect and distracted him from the unsavoury pursuits that endangered his health. He was never wholly immune to their sinister charms, no matter how long he stayed away from them. Indeed, although the ugly brown bottle and well-worn morocco case containing his needle had gone sufficiently untouched for an industrious spider to have erected a web between them and the corner of the mantelpiece, that gossamer strand posed no barrier to inactivity and ennui, which were the only things on the earth that Holmes feared. He dreaded them no more than I did their artificial remedy.
“I should think there are dark enough hearts abroad in a city this size without resuscitating Moriarty,” said I, “even in the present season.”
I hoped by this to begin a debate that might stimulate him until such time as his thoughts turned in a more wholesome direction. However, his humour remained unchanged.
“Dark enough, perhaps. But black is an exceedingly dull colour without the scarlet stain of imagination. Even the agony columns have nothing more original to offer than the common run of spouse beatings, lost luggage, and straying children. It’s enough to make one cancel all his subscriptions.” He waved a slim white hand towards the mountainous rubble of crumpled newspapers that had accumulated round the chair in which he sat coiled like Dr. Roylott’s adder.
“I imagine those complaints are original enough to the people concerned. Really, Holmes, at times you can be most solipsistic.”
He shrugged his shoulders in response, scooped up his charred brier, and filled it with shag from its receptacle of the moment: a plaster cast of the skull of the murderer Burke, the original of which was currently on display at Scotland Yard. The crown of the facsimile had been hinged to tip back for convenient storage.
I plunged ahead. “You once ventured the opinion that your absence from London for any length of time encouraged boldness in the criminal classes. Perhaps you should consider a trip to Paris.”
He smiled without mirth. “Good old Watson. You were less transparent when you urged me as my physician to go on holiday, without resorting to subterfuge. I should be just as bored there as here, with the added exasperation of all those cream sauces. No, I shall stay here and await the diversion of a good poisoning.”
I should have argued the point further had not someone chosen that moment to ring at the street door.
“Hark!” exclaimed Holmes, shaking out the match with which he had been about to light his pipe. “There is a merry bell, and there to answer it the sturdy tread of our esteemed Mrs. Hudson. She may bring us glad tidings yet.”
I heartily joined with him in this hopeful anticipation.
Within moments, his prediction was confirmed. I swung open the door in answer to the landlady’s gentle tap and beheld in her hands a curious-looking parcel, a cylinder wrapped in ordinary brown paper and bound with string.
“A delivery for Mr. Holmes, Doctor,” said she. “I gave the fellow tuppence.”
I handed her that sum and accepted the parcel. It was so light it might have been empty.
“Who delivered it, pray?” asked Holmes, who had unwound himself from his chair with panther quickness at the first touch of her knuckles against the door. He stood behind me crackling with energy, the indolent lounger vanished.
“A commissionaire, sir. He said the package was waiting for him when he reported for duty and no one seems to know who left it.”
“Did you believe him?”
That good Scotswoman drew herself up to her not inconsiderable height. “I’d sooner question the character of the prime minister than a veteran.”
“The king himself could not have said it better,” Holmes said, when we were alone once again. “What do you make of it, old fellow?”
“I should say it’s a package of some sort.”
“Pawky elf!” He snatched it from my hands and carried it over to the gas lamp, where he studied the object thoroughly from end to end and all round. It was less than five inches in length, with a diameter of some two and one-half inches, and as I said weighed rather less than a common box of matches.
“No return address or postmark, just ‘Sherlock Holmes, Esq.’ And the address, written in block.” He sniffed it. “Petroleum-based ink, obtainable in any stationery shop for less than a shilling. One might wish that obfuscation involved more trouble and expense; but if that is the only conundrum it presents, it’s preferable to sitting round pining for a new Napoleon of Crime.” He shook it. It made no noise.
“Careful, Holmes! It may be an explosive device.”
“If so, it cannot contain enough powder to snuff out a candle. I’ve examined quite thoroughly the heft and volume of the various volatile compounds in my monograph on demolitions.” Absorbed in his contemplation of the bundle, he fished a hand inside his pocket, appeared to realise tardily that he was wearing his dressing-gown, and charged to the deal table where he kept his chemical apparatus and instruments. He used a surgeon’s scalpel to cut the string.
The gaily decorated cardboard canister that emerged from the wrapping brought
an expression of chagrin to his face that nearly made me smile. Events of a far more startling nature seldom caused him such consternation. The red-and-gold lettering described an undulating pattern across the adhesive label, spelling out ‘EDISON GOLD MOULDED RECORDS’.
“It’s nothing but a wax recording cylinder!” I cried.
“Your grasp of the obvious is as sound as ever. Its significance is somewhat more obscure.”
“Perhaps someone knows you’re a lover of music. An anonymous admirer.”
“Perhaps.” He removed the lid and peered inside. Then he tipped the contents out onto the table. The glistening roll of hardened wax rotated to a stop against the base of his microscope.
“Nothing else inside,” Holmes reported, groping at the canister’s interior with the ends of his fingers. “The cardboard doesn’t appear to have been tampered with. I doubt any messages are hidden between the layers.” He set it down and lifted the cylinder, submitting it to the same scrutiny.
“Play it,” said I. “It may be a recorded message.”
“My conclusion precisely. I shall make a detective of you yet.”
He carried the cylinder to the parlour phonograph, a present from the grateful captain of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, and slid it into place. He gave the crank a few turns and applied the needle to the recording. A second or two of hoarse scratching issued from the horn, then the sweet strain of strings, accompanied by the singing of an accomplished male tenor:
After the ball is over,
After the break of morn,
After the dancers’ leaving,
After the stars are gone.
Many a heart is aching,
If you could read them all;
Many the hopes that have vanished,
After the ball.
The refrain was repeated, after which the recording scratched into silence. I could make nothing of it, other than that someone had gone to some length to play a joke on the famous detective; but Holmes was galvanised. He charged towards his chair, and there on his knees sorted feverishly through the wrecked newspapers, snapping open the sections and raking them with his eyes, disposing of each as it disappointed him and seizing upon the next. At length he shot to his feet, folding one over.
The Perils of Sherlock Holmes Page 10
